Two's Company, Three's A Relationship: The Truth About Polyamory

David never explicitly came out to his friends or family as polyamorous. David didn't even really feel comfortable using the term polyamorous until recently; until he found that the poly community was more accepting and inclusive than he ever could have imagined. "I just never put my lifestyle into a box," he tells me, simply. "The same way you probably don't necessarily consider yourself a member of the monogamous community, I never thought it was strange or unusual for me to want to have more than one partner at a time. It never struck me as weird."

David is, by his own admission, pretty lucky. He is a man with bountiful reserves of self-confidence, and has been graced with that all too rare gift of kind, understanding parents. When he finally did get around to telling them that his friend Jim was, well, not a friend but a partner, which meant yes, he was dating Jim and Michael at the same time, they asked the questions he knew they would ask. They asked him if Jim and Michael got jealous; if they ever hung out together, the three of them; if they used timetables to fairly divide their time. But those queries out of the way, David's parents got down to the uncomplicated business of loving their son, and last Christmas day they invited Jim and Michael over for dinner.

When The Music approached him for his help with this article, David didn't initially want to talk on the record. "I just didn't know why I would," he said when I finally got him on the phone. "I didn't think I'd be very comfortable being some spokesperson for the polyamorous community, you know? It's not up to me to talk for other people. It's not my job."

But eventually, after days and days of chatting back and forth on Facebook, David finally came around. Not, mind you, because his ego was so stroked that he couldn't say no. No, quite the reverse. David agreed to talk because, like so many other monogamous journalists, I had got polyamorous people completely and utterly wrong.

When I started writing this article, the aim was to focus on people with alternative lifestyles - to pen a deep dive expose about kinks and sexual double lives. I imagined that I might head along to a swingers club, or eavesdrop in on a three-way discussion between polyamorous partners, and I planned for my piece to be filled with steamy revelations and other varieties of filth.

If you want to read a piece like that, there are lots of them online. In fact, the mainstream media's approach to polyamory has been defined almost universally by a kind of hysterical curiosity, and many of the longform pieces about the end of monogamy have been written as though reporters are penning tracts concerning the end of Rome. Indeed, even the more progressive publications are guilty about writing about polyamory as though it is a kink, or some bizarre new sexual revolution. Which, David stresses, it is absolutely not.

"Polyamory doesn't even necessarily denote sexual relationships," David says. "It just means having more than one romantic partner at a time. Some polyamorous people have multiple platonic relationships. So this view of polys as like, crazy fucked up sex perverts is just totally off the mark. That's just not the way it works."

David tried monogamy for a little while. He didn't much care for it. "It just really doesn't make sense to me," David explains. "I mean, it made sense when humans had a life expectancy of 30-something - when we'd get into relationships with the understanding that both partners would be dead within a decade. But humans have outgrown that lifestyle. There's no reason for us to live like that anymore."

David practices a non-hierarchical form of polyamory, which means he rejects the idea that what we generally refer to as "romantic" love is somehow more important or valuable than "platonic" love. His love for his parents, his friends and Jim and Michael is not subdivided into ranks of worth, and he does not see life as a process of quantifying feelings that are by their very nature unquantifiable.

Some of the new friends David has made in the poly community are similarly non-hierarchical - but some are not. Some have multiple sexual and romantic partners who frequently meet, others have multiple sexual romantic partners who do not. Some are in open relationships; they have a single partner that they date, but they are not sexually monogamous.

And that is the nuance that a lot of the mainstream discussion about polyamorous relationships lacks. Polyamorous people can't be discussed as a singular, categorizable entity in much the same way that monogamous people can't; the same way you can't write a searing expose that aims to capture the lived experience of everyone in the world whose favourite colour is blue.

David initially thought it might be daggy to head along to poly meet-ups - kind of like heading along to a Star Trek convention, or meeting up with fellow fly fishermen. "I mean, it's not like you're gonna have tonnes to talk about just because someone else is poly," he says. "It doesn't work that way."

But now, to his surprise, David has found his people. "It's a nice feeling, really becoming part of the community," he says. "It feels good."

I wrap up my interview with David by asking him if he thinks there's anything that the public at large should know about polyamorous people that they don't. "No," he said. "Which, like, is not to say that they have nothing to learn - they have lots to learn. But there's no 'one big thing' that I could tell you that would change the way people thought about polys. All they need to do is actually go out there and talk to polyamorous people," he laughs, "rather than reading pieces like yours, I guess."